Re-ordering tasks

I'm with Jake on this one. If you only had one view of tasks, no filtering of any kind, then manual ordering would make sense. As it is, it's not merely a matter of it being hard to figure out the programming; it's hard to figure out what manual sorting even means when you have filtering. Say you filter by all tasks with tag X due in next five days. You manually set their order. Then you filter by all tasks with tag Y and context Q. You manually set their order. Some of those also have tag X and are due in next five days so showed up in the previous search. Then you go back to the previous search. Presumably you expect them to be in the order you previously positioned them... except what about the ones that also showed up in the second search and whose order you changed? This doesn't even start to be meaningful unless you attach to each task its order position in every single search and filter the user ever did on it.

I used to want manual order change too, but I realized that (a) it was never going to happen, and (b) the lists on which I wanted to do that should never have more than a dozen things on anyway, or my process was wrong in the first place, making the issue moot.

That said, it might be worth adding an attribute called, say, "UserSortKey", for the user to populate with anything specifically designed for sorting. Sort in ASCIIbetical order and the creative user can put tasks in any position, e.g. between A and B with AM.

That said, it might be worth adding an attribute called, say, "UserSortKey", for the user to populate with anything specifically designed for sorting. Sort in ASCIIbetical order and the creative user can put tasks in any position, e.g. between A and B with AM.

Jake's previous suggestion of using tags as position number instead of a tag is actually in response to me essentially suggesting the same thing you just did :) And it works as long as one doesn't use tags for other things. This is a workable solution for me and I'm happy to use it until something else comes up.

I wonder though, is there any way to sort a list by tags without having the separator bar between each tag?

Also, just to be clear, I totally understand how complicated, confusing, etc, it would be to have manual sort across the board with all the folders, contexts etc. Jake explained really well :) But having an option to have some items be manually sorted, without compromising the other features I feel is really important (even if it is only in one list, or even if you have to export tasks to an outline, etc). Using tags for numbers, for me since I don't really use tags, will satisfy this (i.e. I don't use tags much so it is not a bother to appropriate that field as my UserSortKey field).

The more I think about it though, the more a "send to" outline action w a link back to the original task would be pretty nice...be easy to sort it yourself with copy & paste if there was no way to move lines up/down. I hope that one gets onto the development to-do list one day!

Thanks for being open to feedback Jake & team, and thanks for sticking around in this conversation enough to suggest the numbered tag idea. I'll leave you be now that I have a solution that'll work for me :)